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Joe collected sunglasses like some people collected dishes or furniture. He owned several pair of the kind with yellow lenses that claim to give the wearer the sight of eagles, several more that were polarized, others that were cheap dollar-store glasses he didn’t mind losing. His current favorite pair was with him, wherever he was.
A John Deere hat hung from the hook over the door. His Jeep keys dangled from the key hook. A T-shirt drooped from the hook in the hallway. The sheet draped out from beneath the bed’s comforter, left there when she had made the bed, the morning they took to the water.
She looked at the radio, sitting on the table. Silent. Nothing was happening on the water. By way of the radio relay, Nell had learned that the boaters had made it over the Double Falls, and Elton and Mike had sent the faster kayakers out to the shorelines around the pool at its base. Elton had inspected the campsite where Nell had woken. Mike and his crew had tied off above the drop and were checking for signs of passage.
At loose ends, Nell stood and walked through the RV, their new “summer home,” occupied by them exactly three times before this trip. She studied the small space. Touched the towel hanging off the tiny oven. Lifted Joe’s T-shirt hanging on a hook in the hall and held it to her nose, then she wrapped the shirt around her neck for comfort. Tucked the sheet under the mattress. Smoothed Joe’s pillow.
The RV was too small and compact for a large family, but it was just right for them. The queen bed was in the back, with storage hidden behind tension doors that thumped shut like cupboards on an oceangoing boat, keeping the contents inside during rolls and pitches on the road. The special cabinets lined the walls at the ceiling all around, along the walls, and even under the bed and beneath the dinette couches.
There was a tiny kitchenette and a bathroom with a shower so small that Joe bumped his elbows when he washed his hair, thumping and banging like a bass drummer. The miniscule bathroom sink and formed-plastic toilet looked like something from a dollhouse.
The dinette was situated across from the efficiency-size appliances, a narrow table between two bench seats. Because she would be here awhile, Nell leveled the vehicle with the automatic levelers and activated the slide that extended the dinette section of the RV out nearly three feet, giving her floor space. If she wanted, she could move things around and make the dinette into a couch or turn it into an extra bed. She swiveled the driver’s and passenger’s seats around to face back, making a place for seating. Nell wanted the “after-search decompression” to take place here.
And if Joe needed medical attention, the floor space would let medics work on him if there was a delay with the ambulance from Oneida. The vision of Joe lying on the floor, bleeding, a compound arm fracture needing attention, was so strong she had to blink it away. The image was replaced with an image of her husband lying dead on the carpet, pale and bloodless and blue. Acid rose in her throat.
She made it to the bathroom and threw up the cereal she had managed to get down. Curled on the small floor of the bath, she gave in to a hard cry, the sound of her sobs louder than the screams of the preschoolers only feet away. When the emotional storm passed, she crawled to her knees and flushed, pushed to her feet and brushed her teeth. Wiping her chapped face, she stood in the center of their summer home, alone and with nothing to do.
She was frighteningly grateful when a knock on the door interrupted her. So grateful that when it was Claire, with the reporter just behind, Nell didn’t even care. She threw herself into her mother’s arms and held on for life. For once, Claire didn’t babble or berate, or even rebuke her for taking off and leaving her in the hospital parking lot. She seemed to recognize her daughter’s anguish and so she stood there on the gravel lot above the Leatherwood takeout and rocked her, stroking her hair. Saying nothing at all.
Orson stood beside Nolan and the unmarked car, watching. The girl was pretty torn up, all right. But her black eyes and beat-up hands, and the wounds on her chest that his dad had managed to find out about from a gossipy contact at the hospital, made them both think about domestic abuse and murder. And about the money. There weren’t many people who wouldn’t kill for that much money. Self-defense? Greed for sure.
“I’ll talk to the blonde,” Nolan said. “See what I can learn from Nell Stevens’s little pal.”
“You’ve always said that sometimes there are benefits to the job,” Orson murmured. “And the cute friend looks like one of them.”
Nell and Claire sat in the RV together, listening to the reports that were passed up and down the gorge on the radio. Claire had forced her to eat, and when the meal wouldn’t stay down, had fixed her a cup of tea and held her hand while she drank. Her mother didn’t nag or push her own agenda, as Joe would have said. Not exactly. But her few quiet comments eventually wore Nell down and she consented to talk to the reporter, agreeing to issue a statement. Issue a statement. Joe’s kinda talk, not hers. But Claire played on Nell’s burgeoning worry and guilt to get her on camera, saying she should be thanking the searchers and all the auxiliary helpers, which might not have worked had Nell not been on SARs herself and known how much a simple thank-you meant.
Just before two in the afternoon, in time for the news update on local TV, just before the boaters reached the takeout, Nell, wearing her mother’s makeup to cover some of the bruises, emerged from the RV and let the production guy hook her up to a clip-on microphone while standing in front of the RV. It wasn’t the on-camera interview that the reporter wanted, but it was all Nell would agree to.
Fidgeting, uncomfortable with the idea of the mic clipped under her shirt, and still unable to speak in more than a whisper, Nell looked at the reporter, Bailey Barnett, with her perfect, bobbed brown hair and her false expression of concern and said, “I appreciate all the help of the volunteer searchers who are giving up their free time. And the park service and the sheriff’s deputies and the rescue-squad auxiliary members who are providing food.
“My husband, Joe, tried to rescue me when I was hurt.” The tears she had not wanted to spill while on TV fell over her cheeks, burning. Joe was going to tease her unmercifully about that. “And now the good people of several counties are helping to rescue him. Thank you.” Fingers fumbling, she un-clipped the mic, handing it back to Bailey while the reporter was asking her questions she simply couldn’t answer.
Waving away the attention, trying not to sob, Nell once again vanished into the RV and the anonymity and safety it offered. Claire made her another cup of tea and Nell stared at the river. Waiting.
From the open doorway, Orson watched his dad. The older cop leaned against the file cabinet in his office and watched the news. The little wife wasn’t holding up very well. Her black eyes, even under the makeup, were looking more purple, evidence that the bruises were a couple days old at least, though a doctor he knew had confirmed that the cool weather and cold river water might have slowed the speed of healing.
A little blonde stood behind Nell Stevens. Her mother. Orson had expected an older woman. She must have had Nell when she was ten, because she looked all of thirty.
Without turning around or giving an indication he knew Orson was there, Nolan said, “I’m getting old, Junior. The mother of a twenty-one-year-old looks good to me.” He swiveled his head and met Orson’s eyes. “You gonna stand in the hall all day?”
“No.” But the blonde did look good. All perky and bubbly and full of life. The kind of woman his father favored, a woman not unlike his own mother, who had died shortly after he was born.
“Claire Bartwell answered all my questions without a qualm when I approached her at the Leatherwood Ford. Unlike the wife,” Nolan said. “’Course, the mother didn’t know I was a cop at the time.”
Orson had heard all about that interview on the way up, and didn’t know whether to applaud the girl or convict her. Either way, she was good. “This what you called me off patrol and made me drive two hours for?”
“Yeah, come on in, Junior.” Nolan said. “Take a look at all this river crap.”
Squatting in front of the desk, he watched as his father laid out the dry suit Nell Stevens had worn, or claimed to be wearing, when she was caught in the strainer.
“It took some doing, but I tracked down the boat, paddle and some of the gear she had on when she made it to shore,” Nolan said. “Sorry about taking you away from your first day on patrol, Junior.”
Orson half grinned at his father’s insincere apology and dropped down, resting his weight on one foot, an elbow on the other knee, his spit-shined black patrol shoes grinding on the grimy office floor. “You’re not sorry.”
“Nope. I’m not. I need an expert and you’re the closest thing to it. What can you tell me about this equipment?”
Orson flicked the dry suit to him and studied the punctures. “These are consistent with being caught in a strainer.” He turned the water-repellent kayak skirt over and pulled off several of the upper layers of duct tape so he could examine it too. He lined the skirt up around the dry suit.
“Huh. The skirt fits up that high?” Nolan asked.
“Yeah. These repaired puncture sites in the skirt match up with two in the dry suit. This other one in the dry suit is higher up, in an area of the chest that would have been protected by the PFD. But notice the angle of the tears.” Orson stuck a finger through the dry suit. “All at an angle, up, as if a branch wedged up under her vest and caught her chest. She got wounds consistent with that?”
“E.R. doctor says yeah.”
“Crap,” Orson said. “You check the underside of the tape for fingerprints? If not, you’ll have to run them against mine.” His dad grunted, unconcerned. Orson pulled the PFD to him and examined the inside of the bright orange Kitty vest, a vest made for women, specially shaped to allow room for the extra padding God gave most females. He pointed. “Scratches are consistent with branches.” He pulled the rescue knife from its sheath in the front of the PFD. “You checked it for blood?”
“Clean.”
“It’s a Gerber. They make several styles of rescue knives.” Orson held the blade to the slashes that had opened the dry suit’s limbs and torso. “Whatever cut the dry suit looks like it had a few serrations on the blade, maybe up near the haft. See?” He offered the suit and Nolan fingered the ragged spot on the fabric. “This knife’s straight. No serrations. So unless she had another knife, she didn’t cut up her own suit, except for here. Looks like she cut a strop off. I wonder why.” He inspected the vest. “Someone cut the bottom strap. Maybe to get her out of it.”
Nolan stood, sat his butt against the desk and gestured to the other equipment. “What else can you tell me?”
Junior looked at the boat. It was a bright yellow and orange Pyrahna 230 Micro Bat. Not new but not beat all to heck either. He turned it over and a dribble of river water ran out. “Scratches indicate it’s seen a lot of use, but it’s not ready for retirement yet. It’s a fast, responsive creek-boat. It can take anything up through a class V if the paddler is any good. It’s too small for my tastes, but I like a more stable boat. It’ll roll easily, but if a small paddler gets into squirrelly water it’ll toss him around like a cork.”
“I could carry the wife around under my arm all day and not get tired.”
“Sounds painful for her,” Orson said. His dad snorted softly. Orson removed the rescue bag and went through the equipment. “Whoever packed the equipment was thorough.” He held the duct tape from the emergency kit up to the light, comparing it to the tape that repaired the holes in the skirt. “Seems to match. You sending it off for comparison?”
“Yeah. If we find a body. Or if we find reason to charge her.”
Orson rubbed fingerprint dust off the roll of tape and looked the question at his father. Nolan shrugged. “Collected. Not run. I’ll send them in if I need to. Later.”
Orson looked at the kayak seat and found a section of hip pad was missing. In its place was a rolled-up section of dry suit. “Here’s the missing dry-suit parts.” He removed it and compared the knife cuts on that portion to the knife cuts on the dry suit where the girl had cut it. “Definitely two different knives.” He found a meal pouch and opened the Ziploc bag, sniffed and quickly closed it. “Looks like she prepared a cold meal and never got a chance to eat it.”
“Cold meal?”
“Yeah. Dehydrated food is intended to be prepared with hot water and eaten fresh, but you can eat it cold—it just tastes like crap. Survivalists will put a little water in a meal packet and let it sit to make it soft enough to eat. This one’s gone sour. It won’t stink a lot but you might want to double bag it.”
Orson pulled the sleeping bags out of the boat. They were packed one inside the other, tightly rolled, stuffed into a waterproof bag and tied with bungee cords. He opened the waterproof bag and spread the sleeping bags out on the floor. “If she was caught in a strainer, injured and shocky, her husband might have put one bag inside the other like this and gotten in with her to keep her warm.”
“Matches her story,” Nolan conceded.
“Or indicates she’s very well organized and planned ahead.”
Nolan grinned. “Junior, the girl I talked to in the hospital? Even beat all to heck, she kept her head together. Emotional, but not to the point of hysteria or even confusion. She was sequential with her story, not jumping from event to event, like most people I interview. She’s organized. Too organized. Knows her rights. If I get a reason to use county money, I’ll send all this to the lab. For now, it’s just conjecture.”
Orson stood, and his father stood with him. “So, you think maybe she’s been planning it, waiting for the right opportunity. The river trip gave it to her.” Orson shrugged. “Bust her ass, Pop.”
Nolan shook his head. “Not yet. Waiting to see what the SAR turns up. But I didn’t call you back just to look at this river crap. I have a job for you, Junior.”
Orson didn’t like the gleam in his father’s eyes. Not one bit.
8
Listening to the searchers’ comments on the radio as they were relayed up and down the river, Nell fought tears and lost when they found Joe’s kayak and removed it from its securing lines. Her head in her arms at the kitchen table, she heard each report. Waiting. Waiting for any good news. Waiting for them to find Joe. What she heard was information she already knew. The kayak was empty. No supplies. And no Joe nearby, on a rock waiting for help, trapped in a strainer.
No Joe. Not anywhere, alive or…or dead.
One kayaker was assigned to bring the boat in to the takeout, and the team started down the last stretch of the river. It would take a few hours to do a cursory search. There wasn’t time to do a full, in-depth search before sunset.
Nell’s tears splattered on the kitchen table with tiny taps of sound to form a pool. Her breath shuddered along her throat as if claws ripped at it. She silently begged God, begged him, to let her husband be alive. She knew, in some miniscule rational part of her mind, that she was out of control. She, who never cried. Never prayed. “Please,” she whispered. “Please.”
Nell felt Claire’s cool palm on the back of her neck, stroking and soothing. “It’s okay, honey. They’ll find him.”
Though she heard the lie in her mother’s voice, Nell swiveled in her seat and wrapped her arms around Claire’s waist. Her face buried in Claire’s stomach, her mother’s jeans rough on her tender skin, she wept.
Claire massaged her back and neck as the dammed-up emotions flooded out and away. Her mother murmured softly, “It’s okay. You just cry it all out. I’m here, honey. I’m here.”
“I can’t do this,” Nell whispered brokenly. “I can’t do it. I need Joe back. I need him. I’m not strong like you. I can’t do this.” She rocked her forehead against her mother. “I can’t do it.”
Claire’s stroking hand slowed and stopped. “I wasn’t strong when your father died. I was a mess.”
Nell looked up into her mother’s face. “You never cried.”
“I cried. I cried and cussed and threw things and cried and cussed some more. And I hated him for the longest time.” Her pink-lipsticked mouth curled in a sad smile and she brushed Nell’s stiff hair back behind an ear. “And even after all that, even after all these years, I still miss the cheatin’ son of a gun. Can you believe it?”
Nell laughed, a hiccup of surprise. “No.”
Claire waved a hand in the air as if to rub away the negative. “I do. Still. But it was pure torture to live through, him running off with that woman, the church elder’s wife, and them getting killed together. All the gossip at church and in town. The whisperin’. The way the newspaper kept on and on with the story and brought it up over and over during that trucker’s trial for drunk driving and resisting arrest. It was all I could do to get through each day.”
“I didn’t know,” Nell said, the words hoarse.
“’Course not. I had to protect you. You were mine, all I had left to love and provide for. So I survived. And now you have me to survive for. ’Cause I don’t know what I’d do without you.” She wiped Nell’s face with the pads of her thumbs. “Come on. Lie down a while. You need to rest.”
“I can’t sleep.” Fresh tears ran down her face, stinging like salt in wounds. “I can’t. Not until they find Joe.”
“I didn’t say anything about sleep. I said you should rest. I’ll sit with you. And I’ll listen to the radio. And if you doze off, I promise to wake you if they find anything. Anything at all. Come on.” Claire pulled Nell up. Docile, she followed her mother to the bed. Like a child, she lay down when her mother folded back the sheets and held them for her. They were fresh and cool and smelled of Joe. Instantly, she was asleep.
Orson watched from the shadows as Nolan reached to knock at the door of the motor home. It flung open and the old man stepped back, jerking his hand from the swinging door. He looked up to see those blue eyes. Nell Stevens’s mother. Claire. His dad’s mouth opened, but no words came out. Orson hid a smile.
The woman stared down from three steps up, sparks flashing. She came down the steps at him, her face flushing red with anger. His dad, who had faced down moonshiners and pot growers and backcountry mountaineers carrying shotguns and a total disregard for the law, stepped back. She walked up to him, shoulders rigid and fire in her eyes, backing him another two steps before he was able to stop his backpedaling progress.
She leaned into him, her chest a fraction of an inch from his, her chin outthrust, her finger pointing. Pale pink nail polish, Orson saw, that matched her lipstick.
“If you think you’re gonna wake my daughter, you have another think coming. My girl is asleep, after crying her eyes out. You can just wait. You hear me?”
“I wouldn’t think about—I just need to ask—”
“You need to ask nothin’. I know how you cops work.” She put her hands on her hips. Orson saw his dad looking at her mouth. “You start out all sweet and nice and asking simple questions and then you lower the boom with some other awful question that says you think somebody’s guilty of something. It’s a sneak attack, is what it is. Jist like that sneaky way you questioned me about it all without telling me you was a cop. And my Nell is too broke up over Joe to be hurt like that.”
“Miz Bartwell, I—”
“I know you got a job to do. I know somebody’s gotta ask the hard questions and look for guilt. I know somebody’s gotta interrogate, and investigate, and stick his nose into other people’s business. Like assuming my girl is guilty of killing her husband and hiding the body. Right?” she demanded. She shoved her chin closer, nearly touching the old man’s chest. “Right? That’s what you gotta ask?”
Orson was pretty sure his dad had started to sweat. He nodded like he couldn’t help himself. He’d probably have agreed that the sky was green if she told him to. Twenty-five years as an investigator questioning the biggest and baddest the streets had to offer, and this little bitty woman…Orson laughed silently. She scared the hell outta him.
“I understand that,” she said. “But you gotta understand that I gotta job to do too. And my job is to protect my baby. And if you try to hurt her, if you try asking mean questions jist to see her cry, if you try to make her feel worse than she does now for gettin’ hurt and makin’ her husband go down a dangerous river alone to get her help, and then not come back from it, I’ll scratch out your blasted eyes. I’ll cut out your innards and leave your bloody, dead body where only the maggots can find it. And then I’ll pray over your dead, bleeding body that the Lord will somehow save your immortal soul, if you really have one. Are we clear?”
“Pretty clear, ma’am.”
“Come back later.” Claire stomped back up the steps and closed the door in his face.
“Did that little woman just threaten you with blinding, death and maggots?” Orson asked from the shadows. “Isn’t it against the law to threaten an officer of the court?”
Nolan looked over at Orson, leaning a shoulder against the side of the RV, arms crossed over his wet suit, ankles crossed. Amused as hell and not hiding it. Nolan shook his head. “Yeah. I think I’m in love.”
Orson snorted. “She’d eat you up and spit you out, old man.”
“Like I said. I think I’m in love.”
“One ’a these days your love of bitchy women is going to get you killed.”
“Feisty. Not bitchy.”
“You say potato, I say bitchy. But I did notice that she didn’t use a single cussword in all that tirade.”
“And she did offer to pray for me.” Nolan laughed and nodded his head at the river; the two men walked toward the slow-moving water. “You ready to go undercover?”
“I’m ready. But you know for a fact that the more experienced men will say I got this job on your coattails.”
“I asked who had river experience. You were the only one, Junior. Get in there and make nice with the kayak search crew. And don’t screw up, son.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” he said wryly.
“You want a pat on the butt, play football.” Nolan Lennox turned and walked back to his unmarked car, leaving Orson to join the search team and find out who knew what about Joe Stevens. As lead investigator on the Joseph Stevens case, his dad had bigger fish to fry.
As the shadows lengthened along the Leatherwood Ford Bridge, in the extended dusk that steep valleys and rivers always experience, Nell stood on the shore, hiding beneath a wide-brimmed hat and sunglasses, waiting. Her mother was at her side, with one arm around her waist, body heat a comfort at her back. She wanted to be there when the boaters brought Joe’s boat in.
There were four news vans behind them, all with cameras trained on her, one van for each of the competing networks working out of Knoxville, the closest city big enough to have its own TV stations. NBC, CBS, ABC and the local cable van were all present. Nell had seen her own interview on the air before shutting the TV off. She knew how unlikely it was for reporters to get the details right this early in the search, before they found someone—an unnamed source—to give them the skinny. She wasn’t interested in hearing their on-air misconceptions and mistakes or their take on the search.
Joe’s disappearance had made state news, and some pundits were implying that she had done away with Joe, an implication that should have made Nell furious, but only left her exhausted and more determined than ever not to grant interviews to predatory reporters. After hearing the insinuations on local talk radio, Claire had agreed that they were vultures. She had stepped in to protect her daughter’s privacy, telling reporters to stay back or she would shoot them herself, not that Claire owned a gun. Nell leaned in to her mother’s body as she stared at the empty water, the current only a ripple.
Near 4:00 p.m., the first kayak came into view, followed by the rest of the small craft and then by the Maravia Ranger raft, Mike sitting up high on the stern of the boat. Nell saw them all, but her eyes were on the red playboat being towed by the kayaker in the middle of the pack. It moved in erratic patterns behind the towboat, the lack of weight making it skitter across the surface of the quiet pool like a water spider.
Playboats were used by extreme kayakers who wanted to take class V rapids, and then do tricks and stunts in them. The responsive little boats required the weight and experience of a skillful paddler inside to track smoothly. Empty, Joe’s boat had no grace or style or spirit. Nell had an instant of memory—Joe in the boat, practicing a backflip, his body and boat in the air, upside down, churning water below him, his paddle spinning, a wide grin on his face.
She quivered with reaction. Her husband wasn’t dead. He was alive. He had to be. He was too vital, too vibrant to be…to be dead. Tears started to fall again.
